fought & lost

The others might not’ve needed sleep, but he did. He hadn’t died and been bought back as some sort of a puppet for Death, an automaton that didn’t need eight hours every night, or to take lunch breaks, or even pee. When his stomach started growling, he needed to put something in it, when that tug in his gut that signalled another soul to clean up in this town woke him up two hours after he’d gone to bed, he was gonna be pissed.

Slipping out of bed at just gone midnight, Cory had grumbled. Jeans and an old t-shirt pulled on, feet jammed into sneakers, his phone grabbed from the night stand just in case before he’d disappeared, leaving the motel room empty. If he was lucky it would just be a five minute job and he’d be back before Dani even finished her shift at the station. She knew exactly how often he got yanked around Mystic Falls, as though he was the yoyo at the end of the string now held by Elias instead of the old Death, but knowing and avoiding that pit opening up in your stomach at the sight of an empty room were two very different things.

In the end it had just been a half hour job. An elderly woman at a facility on the outskirts of the town. The place had one of those flowery names that tried to hide the truth of what it was – an old folks home where people just sat waiting to die. He’d crept through the doorway to the room, shifting aside as the facility’s doctor and one of the aides slipped out, leaving a sheet shrouded form behind. Cory had flashed the woman a nervous smile, one that the spirit had returned. She’d been expecting this, she told him as they’d stood beside her body, looking so small beneath the sheet. A decade with a bad heart, her body failing one bit at a time. Anticipated or not, she’d wanted to talk before she went with him. A long life in this town spread out for him in a half dozen stories.

Details of them swirled around in his head as he eventually left her Heaven and arrived back in a motel room that was still empty. Cory glanced at the time on his phone as he fished it back out and kicked off his shoes. Dani’s shift had been over for twenty minutes, but she wasn’t back yet. That could mean she’d been called out for something – if he hadn’t felt that tug again then it was likely it hadn’t involved a death, thank God.

His eyes felt gritty, tiredness dragging a yawn out of him as he sat on his bed, propped up by his rumpled pillows. Not yet on the border of sleep again, Cory grabbed the remote and flipped on the TV. At this time of night there was never much on, especially not on the shitty handful of channels the motel offered for free. The news – no thanks. Some cheesy gameshow that’d probably be filled with questions about things he’d missed out during the years he’d been gone. An old black and white movie. Better, even if he’d missed the first hour. Folding an arm beneath his head, he’d started watching it, his mind drifting as he did. Was Ruby awake in her room, same as he was now? Trying to occupy herself with something mindless, something she probably understood just as little as he did, she hadn’t exactly had a childhood of watching cartoons and movies, not when…

Cory swallowed hard, pushing the thought from his mind. She wouldn’t want him dwelling on that. For the most part she didn’t want him thinking about her at all. Wasn’t like he could help it though, he still worried about her, especially after he’d found her out in the woods that last time. As though thinking about a dead body had conjured up another, Cory felt that pull again. Twice in one night? Was Elias doing this on purpose?

Feet back in his sneakers, a quick message punched into his phone this time to tell Dani he’d ‘gone out on a call’.

The quiet house, a place meant for a family, for a happy little suburban life, wasn’t what he expected. The silence was though. It always felt like this at the scene of a violent death, as though the killing had sucked all the sound out of a space, creating a vacuum that would be broken eventually. A banshee’s scream would do that. It hit as soon as he landed, the sound loud enough that he almost dropped to his knees. Cory stood frozen on the other side of the dining table, him, the body of the woman and the banshee forming a triangle with the table at the middle. The scream faded, his ears feeling as though they were ringing for a moment, then the girl spoke and he was gawping at her.

”Hazel!” Cory puffed her name out, his hands coming up as Hazel shrieked. "Sorry! I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to scare you.” He hadn’t even meant to show himself, but seeing Theo and Freyja’s daughter here, screaming the way her dad and uncle had in the past had shocked him enough that he’d lost control. ”Mine too. I didn’t expect to see you here. I didn’t know you were like…” Your dad. There’d never been a hint of it as he’d sat around the dinner table with them, but there wouldn’t have been, would there?

His lips pinched together as he saw the spirit of the woman standing behind Hazel, blood streaking her chin and ears the same way it had in death. Cory gestured to Hazel, keeping his gaze on the spirit. ”Come over here, out of the blood,” he suggested lightly. ”Did you see what happened? Or was she … did you get here after it happened?” Like him, banshees were called to death, usually not all that long after it had happened. If whoever had done this was still in the house, he didn’t want them anywhere near Hazel.

Tagged: HAZEL DAMASCA * Word Count: 1026

You didn’t really question what was going on when someone arrived at the scene of your death and told you that they were there to take you to your afterlife. Things had already been as shocking as they were ever gonna get – at least it had seemed that way to him as he’d stood on the road he’d been forced off of, looking down at his body. He’d died. When Augustus had turned up in his heaven talking about witches and rogue reapers Cory had laughed. It had seemed ridiculous. That wasn’t the sort of thing that went on in the real world. He’d never been one of those kids who threw themselves into fantasy novels, the kids who dreamed of some alien that looked like ET coming down to Earth and landing in their backyard. Any imagination he’d had was squarely rooted in the normal, the everyday. If only he’d known.

Each time he learned of something more, the existence of something else, Cory felt like someone had peeled another set of scales from his eyes. A supernatural killing virus, desiccated looking cowboys who erased people from existence and left them sitting comatose in a train station, men who would do that to children. The latter still left him feeling sick whenever he thought about Ruby and what she’d told him of the life she’d had before she’d almost died in Mystic Falls. How did any parent who knew about that stuff have faith that they could keep their kids safe? It was a question he could’ve put to Freyja and Theo, they’d always been the most incredible parents, and if anyone would have answered him honestly, it would’ve been them.

Maybe he should’ve asked which one of them Hazel had taken after long before now. It wasn’t exactly dinner table discussion though, was it? ’Hey, Hazel, have you screamed over a body yet?’ However their kids turned out, he knew Freyja and Theo would love them unconditionally, but if they knew about this, it had to be weighing on them. Cory let out a long breath as Hazel managed a half smile. This obviously wasn’t her first time coming back to herself as she stood over a dead body. "Nah," he confirmed with a quick shake of his head. ”Your … dad maybe, or your uncle Frank. I guess I should’ve known you might’ve been like them.” But all he’d seen as they’d invited them into their lives, was a sweet little kid that hadn’t had to suffer through the worst nightmares this world had to offer yet. Now he knew he’d been blind to that too.

All too aware of the spirit hovering close by, Cory gestured Hazel closer. This freshly dead the spirit wasn’t likely to do anything to her, but he still wanted to shield her as much as he could from what was going on here. ”You remember walking up to the house?” he asked, his brow furrowing faintly. He gazed past Hazel to the open door into the room, trying to sense if there was anybody still lingering here. For Hazel to have screamed, the death had to be super recent. The second he sensed the weight of guilt coming down on Hazel, Cory reached out a hand and touched her arm lightly. ”There wasn’t anything you could’ve done, Hazel. If you’d been here when she was … hurt … you might’ve been hurt too. You’re not are you? You’re alright?” As though you could be when you were standing there with a dead body.

His throat tightened, but Cory looked at the woman still standing there silently. ”What happened?” he asked her in a whisper. It was a question he usually didn’t want an answer to, it wasn’t his place to go digging into why things happened. The woman didn’t seem to want to answer, just staring down at her body instead. Should he just offer to take her now or take Hazel home first? The latter definitely seemed to make more sense.

Tagged: HAZEL DAMASCA * Word Count: 671